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Messaging App Line Now Brings In Nearly $100M A Quarter, But No Official Word On An IPO
Nov 11, 7:48AM
Line, the messaging app that blew up in Japan over the past two and a half years, is now bringing in nearly $100 million in revenue a quarter. The app, which spun out of its parent company NHN earlier this year, said it brought in 9.9 billion yen ($99.9 million) in net sales for the quarter ending in September. Overall revenues, which include the amount that Line has to pay out to the app stores and developers, has more than doubled in the past six months to 15.6 billion yen ($157.6 million). While there have been reports in local newspapers about an impending IPO next year, the company remained quiet on the subject in an interview on Friday. But we hear from sources closely connected with the company that they are considering an offering in mid-2014. “Of course you’re going to ask questions about an IPO,” said Jun Masuda, who had served as a chief strategy and marketing officer for Line’s original parent NHN Japan before switching over as an full-time executive on the app. “It’s a strategy we’re thinking about, especially looking at services like Twitter. But at the current moment, we don’t believe that it’s something that we have to do right away. We currently have enough cash and we don’t have a pressing need to do an IPO.” Line has seen an astonishing rise for a skunkworks project that came out NHN, which is the company behind South Korea’s big search portal Naver. From its launch shortly after the devastating 2011 earthquake that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Line has accumulated 280 million registered users worldwide. They have never shared figures on monthly active users. The app has totally saturated Japan with 49 million registered users and completely upended the mobile gaming market in Japan, undermining the historical power of gaming platforms like DeNA’s Mobage network and GREE. These two companies ruled in the feature phone era, but DeNA has now seen its shares slide 32.5 percent while GREE shares have fallen 41.5 percent over the last year. Line’s rise, along with that of other apps like Tencent’s Weixin (which has 236 million monthly actives), shows just how volatile the mobile social networking and messaging space continues to be. Now Line is picking up momentum in the gaming space, with 39 published titles and deals in the works to bring more third-party games from abroad over into the Japanese
Garantia Has The Advantage Over AWS When It Comes To Redis, The Popular NoSQL Database
Nov 11, 7:00AM
Last week, Garantia Data raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Bain Capital and Carmel Ventures. The company had previously raised $3.8 million in seed funding to fund its managed service for deploying and scaling Redis, the popular NoSQL in-memory database. The funding comes as Garantia prepares for AWS re:Invent, the conference in Las Vegas this week for the most powerful cloud provider in the world and arguably Garantia's biggest competitor. 
Meet Sense, 3D Systems' Cheap, Dead-Simple 3D Scanner For The Masses
Nov 11, 6:48AM
We've seen more than a few startups cook up their own impressive 3D scanners -- there's Makerbot and its Digitizer, and dark horse Occipital with its mobile Structure sensor just to name a few -- but one of the oldest and biggest names in 3D printers is clearly itching to get in the game soon. 3D Systems just recently outed a cheapish, consumer-friendly scanner called the Sense, and I swung by Engadget's Expand show in New York this weekend to see the thing in action.
Vox Buys Curbed Network For A Reported Stock-Cash Blend Worth $20-30 Million
Nov 11, 4:16AM
Vox Media, an online publisher of websites such as The Verge, has purchased the smaller Curbed network of websites for a reported $20 to $30 million according to the New York Times. The Vox logo now graces the Curbed.com homepage. The deal was a combination of stock and cash, which is unsurprising given that the total deal size is almost commensurate with the recent $34 million that Vox Media raised; when equity can be used to conserve short-term capital, companies such as Vox that are quickly growing can prefer to hold onto their cash.
Flite Launches A Free Online 'Design Studio' For Building HTML5 Ads
Nov 11, 3:00AM
Hey, remember when people were still arguing about HTML5 versus Flash? The battle seems long over at this point, with the rise of the iPhone essentially killing Adobe's Flash platform, but Will Price, CEO of ad tech company Flite, said the transition has taken longer than you might think — it won't be until 2014, he said, that advertisers and publishers "get off Flash completely." (As one indicator of how mobile and tablet have exploded this year, Price said Flite saw 80 percent growth in mobile traffic in October compared to the same period last year.)
Fly Or Die: iPad Air
Nov 11, 2:00AM
With the new iPad Air, the question isn't whether or not the new tablet will fly or die. The question, rather, is whether or not you should upgrade from an older-gen iPad to the iPad air or to the iPad mini? In truth, it all comes down to use cases. 
What Games Are: Squeaky Bum Time
Nov 11, 1:00AM
It's hard to escape the feeling in the mobile games space that times are tougher than they were. Budgets are going up, investors are staying away and the sense that there's just too many players in the market is high. At the same time, however, there is no evidence to suggest that players are walking away from playing games on their devices. What does all of this mean for the mobile market in 2014?
Rather Scrubs Facebook And Twitter, Replaces Things You Dislike With Things You Like
Nov 10, 10:49PM
Remember Unbaby.me? The browser extension that promised to end the endless torrent of baby photos uploaded to Facebook by your proud procreating pals, replacing those posts with pictures of dogs, or cats, or whatever? Take that concept. Expand its focus, from "babies" to "anything you're tired of hearing about". That's the idea behind Rather. Like Unbaby.me, Rather scans Facebook and Twitter for mentions of things you don't care to hear about, and replaces it with something else of your choosing. Tired of hearing about Kanye's latest antics? Set up a filter for "kanye, kanye west, yeezus, yeezy, louis vuitton don" etc. and set them to be replaced with pictures of, say, baby pandas. Next time your friend tweets about yeezy, you'll get pandas instead. If you're curious as to what lays behind the self-imposed censor panda, an "undo" button above the image returns the tweet to its original form. (You can also swap out any tweets that link to websites you don’t like, if you want to get fancy with the filters.) Now, before anyone declares this thing a ripoff of the aforementioned Unbaby.me concept: it's actually built by the same folks. After Unbaby.me proved to be a bit of a viral smash, co-creator Chris Baker left his gig as Creative Director at Buzzfeed, and he and his two co-founders, Pete Marquis and Yvonne Cheng, expanded the concept beyond blockin' all things baby. Alas, there's a challenge or two inherent to the concept, and neither of them are very easy to overcome: Filtering is done based on keywords, not image content. If you're filtering "Nickelback" and one of your friend posts a picture of Chad Kroeger with nary a mention of the band he fronts, there's not a lot they can do. Fixing this (that is, analyzing each and every image in your social feeds) would take the project from "simple, fun browser extension" to "holy shit that is some hardcore computer science". Images are primarily pulled in via Instagram hashtags. The baby panda example above, for example, would pull from Instagram's #babypanda. Sadly, people, in general, suck at hashtags. So for every 10 pictures of actual baby pandas you'll get, you'll get one of a random dude who decided to tag his awkward selfie "#babypanda" because he thinks it’s cute. (If this becomes an issue, the team recommends using your favorite RSS image feeds instead) Alternatively, you can mute
The LA Times Trolls Innocent Teachers
Nov 10, 7:00PM
The once-respectable Los Angeles Times is leveraging its dwindling platform to attack individual teachers under the guise of data transparency. The editorial board won a court case allowing them to use a highly contentious, self-designed algorithm to rank the best and worst teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Neither the suicide of one of the shamed teachers, nor the widespread criticism of the statistical methods have aroused the editorial board's better judgment.
How Mobile Alters Traditional Network Effects In Marketplaces
Nov 10, 6:00PM
On the web, marketplaces are the stuff of legend. With properties like eBay and Amazon, among many other, an online marketplace harnesses the openness of the web, more efficiently matches supply with demand without too many intermediaries, and leverages network effects to capture economic value during each transaction. A key component for a marketplace to work, however, is liquidity -- the comfort in knowing that for each item or request posted, there is a willing buyer at a certain price. Liquidity is what drives the engine of a marketplace, what keeps sellers coming back to list items and what keeps buyers coming back to fulfill their needs, and in order to have it, it requires scale -- that lots of people be able to access the marketplace.
Nonplussed
Nov 10, 4:00PM
I sat down to write up the new YouTube comment system earlier this week, and before I finished the article, I had deleted my Google+ account — my real one, not the joke one that you acquire during the YouTube signup process. The labyrinth of settings and accounts involved struck me as so absurd, and the process so hostile to comprehension, that they needed to be described as they might have been experienced by an ordinary user, and not from the more meta perspective of a tech writer or web designer.
Apple Reportedly Developing Large Curved Screen iPhones For Late 2014, Better Touchscreen Sensors
Nov 10, 11:01AM
Apple is said to be working on two curved display iPhone models for the "second half of next year," according to a source speaking to Bloomberg, with a likely release planned for the third quarter, as well as better touchscreen sensors that introduce fine pressure sensitivity for later devices to be introduced after that.
Yale Adds Another Stop To The College Hacker Circuit
Nov 10, 3:46AM
The organizers of the hackathon at Yale this weekend aren't exactly sure how many students turned out for the sleepless grind. Gauging from the depletion of YHack t-shirts, they put it at about 950. 
These Hand-Made, Solar-Powered Nixie Watches Are Retro-Tastic
Nov 10, 1:00AM
Nixie watches are nothing new - Woz wears one sometimes - but these glowing tubes, originally designed in the 1970s for heavy-duty industrial displays, are hard to power and hard to maintain. However, it looks like a designer has finally hit on exactly the right mix of cool styling and power management. 
Prefundia, A Platform For Crowdfunding Projects To Gain Backers Ahead Of Launch, Exits Beta
Nov 10, 12:00AM
Prefundia wants to help crowdfunding projects get backers before they launch their campaign. The startup, for startup it is -- launching out of U.S. accelerator Boomstartup this summer -- has been operating in beta for the past three months, and has just released some early performance data as it opens its doors to the public.
Instagram Is Down For Some Users Due To 'System Issues'
Nov 09, 11:58PM
A number of Instagram users are currently reporting difficulty accessing the popular photo-sharing service both on the web and mobile versions of the app. At 3:37 pm Pacific Time this afternoon, Instagram confirmed the outage in a Tweet citing "system issues". As of 4:00pm PT, the system still appears to be having problems for many users. Indeed, trying to visit individual Instagram profiles on the web (such as TechCrunch's) is currently turning up a 504 gateway timeout for me. 
Year Up Helps Give Urban Youth The Training And Connections They Need To Land Hot Tech Jobs
Nov 09, 11:20PM
Here in the tech industry, it seems that people are always talking about "how hard it is to hire." That's something that can sound a little odd, given that there are still so many unemployed people here in the United States. But the reality is, there is often a gap in skills and connections between the many people who are looking for work, and the many hot job openings in tech and business. One organization called Year Up is dedicated to closing that gap, which it calls the "opportunity divide," by providing specialized one year of intensive training to young adults aged 18 to 24 with no more than a high school diploma. After training is completed, the program provides introductions to companies keen to hire skilled staff. It's working out quite well: 100 percent of Year Up graduates are placed into an internship. And earlier this fall, the White House recognized Year Up's founder and CEO Gerald Chertavian for the impact of the program.
Microsoft Starts Taking Office On The Web Seriously
Nov 09, 10:00PM
Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its Office 365 suite with a couple of new features and licensing terms. Overall, the update was very much in line with the other 100 changes Microsoft had made to its subscription-based Office version for consumers and businesses, but one feature stood out. Starting this week, all Office Web Apps will feature real-time collaborative editing – a feature previously only available to the Excel and OneNote web apps. This in itself is an interesting move, but while talking about the update, John Case, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Office division, told me that this also signals a new way of thinking about the Web Apps inside of Microsoft. Let’s take a step back first, though. If you are unfamiliar with the Office Web Apps, just take a look at SkyDrive and upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. Once the file is online, you can view it in SkyDrive, but most importantly, you can also edit it in a light-weight version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity apps. The Office Web Apps launched three years ago, but have mostly flown under the radar, despite the fact that they are more fully featured than Google’s offerings. Given Microsoft’s control over the file formats, it’s also significantly better at displaying and saving files without mangling any of the formatting. They also use the same Ribbon menu as the regular desktop Office apps, so regular Office users should be productive in them right from the get-go. Until now, however, these Web Apps were basically companions to the clients, and Microsoft did virtually nothing to promote them. It looks like that’s changing now. As Case told me, Microsoft is now finally starting to view the Office Web Apps as standalone services. Case wouldn’t say whether Microsoft is considering a move to a freemium model and package paid services on top of the free offering. If Microsoft considers the Web Apps as a standalone version of Office, though — and in the (very) long run, they could become the only version, after all — I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s something the company is considering. Microsoft always focused heavily on the Office desktop clients. That’s where all the money was made, after all. Now that it has moved to a subscription model anyway, adding premium features to the Office Web Apps feels like a logical next step. Case told me Microsoft plans
To Save Itself, The DSLR Market Should Look To Smartphones And Revalue Each Press Of The Shutter
Nov 09, 8:00PM
There's mounting evidence that the tendency to favour smartphones over standalone cameras isn't just tanking compact camera sales – it's affecting DSLR and interchangeable lens cameras, too. A new WSJ report claims that DSLR camera shipments could fall 9.1 percent by the end of 2013, versus 2012, according to research firm IDC. It's a sign that going retro might not be the only thing required to save standalone cameras from going extinct.
Gillmor Gang: Hocus Pocus
Nov 09, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — find themselves in a quandary over Steven Elop's alleged exit strategy for Microsoft. Is he really serious, dumping XBox and casting aside Bing? Or is this just a magician's sleight of hand, misdirecting the attention from the more radical idea of abandoning Windows to save Office. The Gang is torn on whether Office can make the voyage to mobile or not, but with Bill Gates' so-rumored involvement in the Post-Ballmer strategy, it seems unlikely the next CEO will stop protecting Windows by making Office cross-platform. Head of MS PR Frank Shaw is openly dismissive of the Bloomberg story, and most pundits doubt Elop will get the job turning the aircraft carrier around. It may be fiction, but our bet is some version of this story will be the rabbit pulled out of this hat.
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